National Book Foundation — “Who did you write this book for?”

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“Who did you write this book for?”

We asked the authors longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry to answer the question, “Who did you write this book for?” Check out all of their responses below…

To see our full list and learn more about the Longlist titles, visit:

http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2016.html#poetry



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Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human  

Brooklyn Arts Press

“When I wrote this book I was thinking about my hometown of Chicago and how it destroys itself, abolishes public services, closes psychiatric hospitals, privatizes or shutters its public schools, and militarizes its police that have murdered and tortured with degrees of impunity since the 1970s

I was thinking about how Chicago is like the Chile my parents left in the 1970s, which destroyed itself by depleting public services, by privatizing and destroying its public schools, by privatizing and destroying its social security system, by murdering and torturing its citizens in the name of neoliberal progress

I was thinking about immigrants, refugees and workers in the US and abroad who give up their lives to survive in economies that exploit them and make them invisible.

And I was thinking about bureaucracies and the abuse of data and fake mathematical measures to justify the destruction of real people’s lives.

I was thinking those who cannot survive the brutalities of our rotten economies.”


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Rita Dove, Collected Poems 1974 – 2004

W. W. Norton & Company

Ars Poetica

“Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant
was nothing, a blink
in the long dull stare of Wyoming.
Halfway there the unknown but terribly
important essayist yelled Stop!
I wanna be in this; and walked
fifteen yards onto the land
before sky bore down and he came running,
crying Jesus—there’s nothing out there!
I once met an Australian novelist
who told me he never learned to cook
because it robbed creative energy.
What he wanted most was
to be mute; he stacked up pages;
he entered each day with an ax.
What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.”


@wwnortonlibrary @wwnorton



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Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics

Wesleyan University Press

“I don’t often think of myself writing for something or someone, but out of something—or, to put it another way, with something. Obviously, with my imagination and experience, but also very much with the poets and artists that have informed my work throughout so many years. They’re in the room with me. I feel like I’m just a class of worker that has been with us for millenia, along with farmers or fishermen or, for that matter, soldiers. For as long as we’ve had war, we’ve had poetry. I’m interested in a lyric of reality, with all its damage and beauty, and I’m trying to contribute to the reality of the lyric, a precious tool for understanding the human record that’s been passed from reader to reader and writer to writer through all these of years.”


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Donald Hall, The Selected Poems of Donald Hall

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

"As I head toward the age of 90, I wanted to make a selected poems brief enough so that it included my best poems and was not too heavy to carry. (Most late-life selections or collections are too heavy to lift!) Looking through my old books I tried to winnow my choices to the very best, only in my own opinion but remembering the opinions of others. I thought it might be sensible to leave such a collection behind me.”


@hmhbooks


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Jay Hopler, The Abridged History of Rainfall

McSweeney’s

"The Abridged History of Rainfall is an extended elegy for my father who passed away in 2009.”


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Donika Kelly, Bestiary

Graywolf Press

“I dedicated Bestiary to the women who helped save my life again and again: the five therapists I’ve seen since I was 18 years old. To put it bluntly, I would not have survived to write this book without them.

Bestiary extends to readers who have experienced depression and anxiety, sexual trauma, and/or familial loss an offering and, hopefully, a resonance. The offering is a gesture of vulnerability, a way of saying to readers, here are the issues I’ve wrestled with and will continue to engage, does this make sense to you? The hope is that the articulation of this question across the landscape of the book will resonate with other folks’ experiences.”


@graywolfpress


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Jane Mead, World of Made and Unmade

Alice James Books

"The inspiration for a poem has a way of arriving unannounced—some combination of phrase, image, and rhythmic cast sparks the imagination. Then all your knowledge of craft and world are brought to bear upon the little scrap to shape it into something comprehensible. You navigate a poem to its completion, guided by your sense of aesthetic, included in which is the changing notion of what “comprehensible” means.  All of this takes us a long way from writing for a particular audience. Nonetheless—when I am told that this book speaks to someone in grief, making loss somehow more manageable, or that the book makes more real the people we are talking about when we discuss immigration between the US and Mexico—whenever I am told I have reached someone, the feeling of gratitude is unspeakably, overwhelmingly gratifying.”


@alicejamesbooks


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Solmaz Sharif, Look

Graywolf Press

"I wrote Look for the dead. For the displaced. For myself and my own outrage and perceived powerlessness. For history, believing that somewhere in our literary record, this outrage, this grief, this Mustapha Mohammad Khalaf, 15 months old must be registered, that the history of the “Wars on Terror” should not be left to the generals and the embedded journalists. For the readings I attended and left complaining that no one was writing about the wars. For those who said the art would suffer, who said political poetry was easy, didactic, and should remember its place. For Baghdad, Basra, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jenin, Deir Yassin, Abadan, Baltimore, Fruitvale. For those whose bodies lie in the streets while uniforms chatter and chew their gum, those whose corpses some can walk around. For the despised everywhere. For the poets—Jordan, Darwish, Rich, Césaire, Rukeyser, Oppen, Williams, Whitman, and on and on—who spoke to me. For myself seen hardly worthy of address, who spoke wrong, to say I see you. Of course, for you. For the wonder with which I find myself alive at all.”


@graywolfpress


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Monica Youn, Blackacre

Graywolf Press

"Since Blackacre was published, women have approached me at readings to share their own stories of infertility—of miscarriages, failed IVFs, the incremental dwindling of hopes. Often these women have tears in their eyes, but still they always whisper—ashamed, as they wouldn’t feel ashamed of other misfortunes. So much shame surrounds infertility, so many levels of alienation. Alienation from their own “failed” bodies. Alienation from their own “womanhood,” in a culture that casts infertile women as sexless, unwholesome: bitter spinsters, evil stepmothers. Alienation from their own life choices, from career paths that delayed motherhood, from relationship choices not to “settle.” I didn’t dedicate Blackacre to anyone—it seemed too dark a book for a dedication, an effort to exorcise my own alienation. But if I could dedicate the book now, I would dedicate it to those women, and all women who have been subject to similar shame.”


@graywolfpress


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Kevin Young, Blue Laws

Alfred A. Knopf


“Given that it’s a selected poems covering nine books and several uncollected poems, Blue Laws is written for many different people. There are the friends and family who sustained me, many of whom have had their own volumes dedicated to them along the way: from my wife to my grandmother, mother, and my late father, who is the topic of much of my recent work. But Blue Laws as a whole is dedicated to my cousin Keith, one of my closer boy cousins who died young when I began the poems over twenty years ago—I think of him often. The book I hope is a monument not just to his memory, but to the future he inspires.”

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